Warsaw, from territorial harmony to social housing

Abstract

Throughout the XX century, the urban conception involved key events during the post-war
periods. Warsaw, with a strategic position between Western and Eastern Europe, received the inflow
of artistic currents from both. This fact entailed the proposal and materialisation of substantial
urban work aimed at recomposing it from its ashes as from 1945. Its location had enabled it to
collect data from the most important urban reviews in this period in Western Europe, as well as
territorial and urban ideas worked on by the Soviet socialist current. At the same time, the contacts
of the Polish town planners such as Nowicki or Szymon and Helena Syrkus, with architects of the
stature of Mayer, Le Corbusier, Sert, or the influences of Sigalin or Goldzamt from the Soviet School,
converted the city into an Experimental Laboratory. In this situation, a complex territorial system
was addressed, rooted in the decision of Syrkus for the “Functional Warsaw”, not forgetting the
socialist models of the 20s or the thought of Taut and Meyer. Seeking a fluid city, the compact
nature of Warsaw in 1939, was redrawn on a grid pattern structured on hierarchical routes, like
Chandigarh, London and Baghdad. This could have been shown in the approach of the Pole Nowicki
around 1945 for the post-war city. This led to covering the need for housing in peripheral areas,
forming settlements and roadways in order to resolve their shortages and integrate the new grid
into the reconstructed compact city.